Use HATS to Generate Atom Feeds for Mainframe Applications

Nowadays, content distributors deliver all content, including news and
site updates, as feeds. Most enterprise applications use feeds for
various purposes, including to monitor an application and check the
status of a project. Content providers publish a feed link on their site
that users register with a feed reader. The feed reader checks for
updates to the registered feeds at regular intervals. When it detects
an update in the content, the feed reader requests the updated content
from the content provider. The feeds contain only a summary of the content,
but they provide a link to the detailed content. Atom Syndication Format
and RSS are the most common specifications of feeds. We're using Atom
feeds in this article, but you can change easily to RSS feeds with a
little modification. This article leverages a product called IBM
WebSphere Host Access Transformation Services (HATS), which converts
any given green-screen, character-based 3270 or 5250 host application
into a Web application (HTML) or rich-client application. HATS also allows
programmatic interfaces to convert the identified content in these host
applications into any other format. We take a step-by-step approach to
show you how to write a HATS program that converts the host application
content into Atom feeds... Delivering data as Atom feeds in mainframes
opens a new world of possibilities for enterprise applications.
Organizations can use mashup editors to extract data from companies with
external or internal feeds and create new applications or information.
For example, call centers can take advantage of mashups by passing a
calling customer's ZIP code information to Google Maps to identify the
location of the customer. This can help the call center employees
personalize the conversation by enquiring about the weather from the
customer's location, and so on. The delivery of data as Atom feeds in
mainframe servers is one of the fundamental building blocks that enables
an organization to embrace Web 2.0.